Mr. Aldrich's Poetry

IF popularity were a result which every poet aimed assiduously at achieving, there would be much disappointed lamentation round about Castaly; for especially when we review the names of living poets it is possible to find that fortune, as regards their fames throughout the land, has behaved with a great deal of her customary caprice. Possibly Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, however, is not one of those singers who has ever deserved to win his laurel from the general throng. Indeed, he seems to have put forward no pronounced claim toward poetic recognition, but rather to feel satisfied with that sort of performance which, if the reverse of trivial, is no less the reverse also of expansive or sustained. His forte appears to be lyric poetry alone, and lyric poetry served in small installments; but the noticeable brevity of these songs, when considered in connection with their vividness of verbal coloring and their nearly faultless rhythm, helps to produce the effect of an added grace, because it is a brevity always in keeping with the light and dainty loveliness of the thought expressed.

Wholly out of the question seems a comparison between Mr. Aldrich’s work and that of any dead master, unless, perhaps, we except Keats and Herrick. But even his resemblance to these two poets of the past is at times very vague and often quite indistinguishable. Mr. Aldrich can be compared with nothing of yesterday, because he writes and thinks in a spirit of intense modernness. It is doubtful whether even Mr. Rossetti would deny the pungent preraphaelitism of the following lines, for example : —

Or of this: —

Or yet of the following: —

Where the influence of Keats is manifest seems only to be in a love for colors and the blending of colors — the passion to write as an artist paints, and use words as an artist uses pigments. This tendency has been somewhat sneered at, by the way, among recent critics. The fashion has been to cry down “ wordpainting ” because it has given rise to much bad art and bungling extravagance. There can be no doubt that the art of making pictures from words is one for which numerous worthy minds have no possible faculty of appreciation, but it is one which exists, notwithstanding, and which will continue to exist, moreover, so long as for certain other minds the mere word itself, independent of all intellectual surroundings, possesses an essential and intrinsic charm; a charm, in truth, like nothing except an artist’s delight in the colors which he lays upon his canvas before those colors have shaped themselves into the desired design. ”Pour le poëte,” says Théophile Gautier, himself a marvelous master of words, “ les mots ont en eux - mêmes et en dehors du sens qu'ils expriment, une beauté et une valeur.”

This sensuous love of language for the sake of itself, more than for the idea it covers, is everywhere observable in Mr. Aldrich’s poems. He has perpetually a tendency to load his phrases with a weight of striking and newly-arranged words. Admirable is the control with which he meets this tendency, it must be conceded. There are no unaccountable verbal gatherings in the forum of his verse. We are not tripped up with splendid synonyms ; we do not flounder in any fine morass of adjectives. His love for words, indeed, is not shown in this fashion, but in what might almost be defined as its antipode. Everywhere is manifest the dainty chooser, the tasteful searcher, the careful weigher. When we have done reading one of Mr. Aldrich’s most, characteristic lyrics, we are apt to have a vague sense of a gilt frame and a catalogue. The art is always there, and the poetry is very rarely not there, and the blending of both produces often an effect of picturesqueness rarely equaled if ever surpassed. Take as an example of this the exquisite morsel of verse entitled After the Rain. Here we have a thread of the richest poetry, in the midst of most effective and studious elaboration as regards descriptive detail.

Mr. Aldrich sings merely for the pleasure of singing, and lays no shadow of claim toward being ranked as a “ teacher ” of anything more noticeable than that the rarer jewels of fancy, when set in finely-wrought verse, make the most charming sorts of ornaments, He has no pet philosophy with which he stuffs, as one might say, all the spare interstices of his verse; he does not lean extravagantly toward mediævalism; he is so little of a mannerist that few metrical tricks peculiar to his verse might be evidenced against him; and as for that marked self-abandonment, so observable among most modern poetry when it treats of erotic subjects, one might say of Mr. Aldrich’s love-poems that they are perhaps too coldly graceful, too skillfully dispassionate. In brief, we find him apparently no follower of a school, no member of a poetical clique, no sharer of an ideal, or of ideals, with brother bards. He produces little, but that little is of finished and enduring fabric; and he seems to take of poetry what, to my own thinking, is the one wholesome view which can be taken of it — the view of Charles Baudelaire, that most gifted of French lyrists, of whom it must be conceded that he wrote at all times consistently with his opinions. “ Aucun poëme,” declares Baudelaire, “ ne sera si grand, si noble, si réritablement digne du nom de poëme, que celuiqui aura élé écrit uniquement pour le plaisir d’écrire un poëme.” And again he states, in speaking of “la poésie:” “ Elle n'a pas la vérité pour objet, elle n’a qu’elle même. ” Nothing can be truer than this, vehemently as some may deny it. The moment that poetry is made the mouth-piece of creeds, theories, moral and intellectual aspirations, that moment it loses its birthright and fails in its most forceful charm. Ex ungue leonem. Mr. Aldrich may or may not long ago have discovered this simple truth, but it is nevertheless certain that his exquisite poems are everywhere good witnesses of its value. For example, in the hands of some fervid moralist, it is easy to imagine what weight of cumbrous comment might attach itself to the following felicitous thought, which, under Mr. Aldrich’s treatment, takes the clean - cut noticeableness of some fine intaglio: —

A portion of his poetry which deserves to be separately regarded, and for that matter distinctively praised, are Mr. Aldrich’s sonnets. As a rule the English sonnet is something from which the reader recoils at sight, as though he scented the blood of tortured syllables and massacred syntax. When the sonnet contains three or four good lines it usually happens that the remaining eleven or ten are in various degrees a weariness. I remember scarcely a single English poet since Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats, who has not drawn rather clumsy results from this tough literary task, and I can think of no distinguished American poets, except Mr. Longfellow and Mr. Lowell, who are creditable sonneteers. Indeed, until Mr. Aldrich wrote, it was hard to believe that, unless by directly imitating the quaint phrases of the Shakespearean sonnet, anything like a nice blending of grace and sweetness and subtlety could be made conformable with the modern manner. But how thoroughly do we find these three attributes commingled in the following bit of choicest and chastest rhapsody: —

But Mr. Aldrich can play more solemntoned melodies — and play them most powerfully, too — on the restricted accommodation of this fourteen-stringed harp, the sonnet. In By the Potomac, we have perhaps the most perfect of the few good poems which our late war produced: —

If this be not veritably “ noble music with a golden ending,” it bears, at least, close resemblance to such literary rarity. Mr. Aldrich has written no sonnet that is not apt, through some peculiar beauty of fancy or phrasing or rhythm, to haunt the reader’s imagination afterwards with some persistently recurring melody. And indeed, only to glance over his remaining sonnets is to find how rich they are in the pure gold of lines like —

or,

or,

or,

But it will be well to end quotations which are of such a piecemeal nature as scarcely to speak justly for the work from which they have been taken. Let us listen to one more sonnet, however, which Mr. Aldrich calls Pursuit and Possession, and which is probably, for exactness of diction and epithet, for perfect consonance of subject and metrical form, for every grace and charm, in brief, except possibly that of equaling in its idea the poet’s usual originality, the most successful sonnet he has given us:

A poem of great rhythmic beauty and exquisite tenderness of conception is the mediæval legend which Mr. Aldrich tells under the title of Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book. The poem begins by narrating how Friar Jerome was covered with remorseful wretchedness because of a slight fault long ago committed. Hitherto it has been his regular task

But to-night he suddenly conceives a holy disgust for this duty, and exclaims:

Then it occurs to him that those precious illuminated books of the convent have existed for ages, realms and kings alike disappearing. Next, he journeys among the ancient hiding-places of these volumes, giving Mr. Aldrich an opportunity for the following exquisite passage : —

After poring with delight, over these pages, Friar Jerome determines that he shall himself assume the task of illuminating, “ on smooth clear parchment,” the “ Prophet’s fell Apocalypse,” telling himself, whilst he contemplates what seems so glorious a labor,

The Beautiful Book is accordingly begun. The friar labors with passionate zeal,

Suddenly a blight falls upon the surrounding country. Crops fail; famine reigns; and in the wake of famine walks

The monks, in solemn file, led by their chanting prior, go forth from the convent to shrive the sick “ and give the hungry grave its dead.”

Horrified by this dreadful change, the poor friar starts up and cries out to God that he recognizes in it a punishment for his own neglect to hear the divine voice when it called upon him most loudly. He leaves his book still incomplete, therefore, and hurries to the succor of the plague-stricken hundreds in that accursed land. He performs many deeds of humane self-sacrifice. At last the plague diminishes, the black vapor that has covered the country rolls away, and there is universal thanksgiving at the return of healthful peace. But

And now the friar crawls up the “ moldy stair ” to his cell, looking “ like some unshriven church-yard thing,” desirous of gazing once more upon the pages of his beloved book.

Strikingly delightful as we find Friar Jerome’s Beautiful Book, both for execution and conception, it is surprising that Mr. Aldrich has written, except his popular ballad of Babie Bell, no poem of equal length which at all approaches it as a piece of authentic and original work. But all his long poems, except those mentioned, are in blank verse; and here Mr. Aldrich is no master. He is indeed a follower of the Tennysonian model to such a painstaking degree of fidelity that we are often led to marvel at the imitative skill he has shown. Scarcely a line in Judith is free from a most marked resemblance to the English laureate’s work — the Tennyson of the Arthurian Idyls and of Enoch Arden. It is only in Mr. Tennyson’s blank verse that any characteristic manner, individualism, representative style, or whatever name the trait deserves, is invariably to be found; and consequently his blank verse is the most dangerous of all to imitate or even be influenced by. It is unfortunate that the fine thoughts and graceful conceits of Judith should all be cast in the same well-known mold; for their value, on this account, whether small or great, can only derive its proper estimate from their degree of adherence to the guiding model. Byron’s execrable blank verse was at least his own, but the very beauty and polish of Mr. Aldrich’s is something which we must admire as the ingenuity of the copyist. It is superb imitation, by the bye, and there are not many living writers who have the skill to approach it.

But Mr. Aldrich will find in the future, let us hope, other ways of convincing his readers that he is a very noticeable lyrist than this perilous way of writing unoriginal pentameters. If in succeeding works he only maintains the lyric level, so to speak, of works gone before, we shall have, reason to rejoice; but the excellence of what he has already achieved still leaves ample room for even stronger and better achievement — a fact of which none is perhaps more clearly cognizant than the poet himself.

Edgar Fawcett.